Friday, November 20, 2009

My Second 15 Seconds of Fame

I know, I know, I've been terrible about this blog, so, sorry to everyone who depends on me to entertain you. IE - mainly folks I'm related to.


Almost two years ago to the day (minus about 4 days) I got picked, with my buddy Matt, to do a contest during a Thrashers game, and we did not do so well, we "Lost All" in the Risk it All game. Fast forward two years (minus about 4 days) and I got a chance to redeem myself! This time, we were sitting in the 200-section, just above the concourse walk-way when I noticed J-Bird snooping around below, I've been to enough games to know he was looking for someone for a contest. He turned around and faced our section and asked a girl in the front row if she wanted to sing karaoke...she said no. Then asked Christine, who was next to me, she said no, and then I think she pointed at me. Then J-Bird turns to me and asks me to do it. Sure! I'll make a fool of myself!!!! So I go down there, he tells me the game. It's a karaoke style where they'll play a song and at some point stop it and I'd have to sing the next verse. Ok, that should be embarrassing enough! Awesome! Then he says, since we're playing the Boston Bruins, we're gonna be doing the Boston song - More Than a Feeling. Sure, I know that song. He starts singing it and it doesn't sound familiar AT ALL. Apparently the only part I knew was the chorus somehow. Awesome! I must've had a pretty serious blank look on my face because he was about to find someone else to do the contest. I said no, I wanna do it, even if I screw up it'll be fun! So, I had the brilliant idea, hey, I can look it up on the jphone! And bam! I've got the lyrics. I kept going over them over and over in my head until I thought I had it down.

As I said in my last blog, J-Bird is a weird dude. While the hockey game was still going on, he was doing play by play in an Austin Powers accent. I told him my name was J, he asked me about 4 times, I'm like dude, you've got the same name, how hard is this?

Finally it came time to actually do the contest. A couple of the Thrashers cheerleaders came by to make me look good. So thanks for that! If only we could do something about those logos on their backs!!! They made me take my jersey off and put on a Hard Rock t-shirt on. I had to fight to keep my hat on, I had a serious Jew-fro going on up there. So here we go, they introduce me to the crowd and go over the way the contest works. They play a few lines from the song and then stop it and I have to sing the next line. As soon as they started going I froze up, completely forgot how the song went, completely forgot the line I needed to sing. It was supposed to be - "I closed my eyes and I slipped away". I really have no idea what words I actually sang but I definitely didn't say slipped away. Not only that, but I kinda screamed it out more than sang. In front of about 12,000 of my closest friends too! Afterwards J-Bird said, hey you kinda went Ozzy on us there, nice! Luckily they said, close enough and said I was a winner. I got a $50 gift card to Hard Rock, and everyone in my row got $25 gift cards. Oh, and I won a free Hard Rock t-shirt.

Here are some pics from different friends from throughout the arena...with more to come